Monday, June 4, 2018
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #277
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Sunday, June 3, 2018
The robot revolution is just beginning
Jibo — a so-called “social robot” — is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they’re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile.
And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture.
An article written in 2015 by a former Pentagon robotics researcher looks more prescient by the day.
That summer, Gill Pratt, who oversaw robotics technology as a manager of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said robot capabilities had crossed a key threshold. Improvements in electric energy storage and the exponential growth of computation power and data storage, he argued, had enabled robots to learn and make decisions informed by the experiences of other robots.
His expectation back then? Robots would multiply like rabbits because they were no longer simple-minded, single-purposed machines. And as robots learn more and more, Pratt argued, more people will have uses for them.
Today, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Demand for robotics is increasingly broad-based. Everybody seems to want them.
To get a sense of this growth, consider: In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group forecast the global market for robotics would reach $67 billion over the coming decade. Just three years later, BCG last June revised that dollar figure upward – by another $20 billion.
Industry has for decades been a core consumer of robotics. Today, the majority of the world’s robots are still used in factories.
What’s different is that those robots are a lot smaller, more perceptive and more collaborative than their predecessors. And the flood of venture capital into the space ensures we’ll be seeing a lot more of them in our distribution centers and warehouses in coming years.
Consider that between 2016 and 2017, venture capital investments in industrial robots more than tripled, from $402 million to $1.2 billion. Five years ago, startups in this same space raised just $195 million.
Also interesting about this current robotics explosion is that companies from a wide swath of other industries, from retailers to hotels, are embracing the benefits of smarter machines. The insurance industry, for example, has begun using artificial intelligence tools like machine vision and natural language processing to handle claims.
These expanding use cases help explain why Boston Consulting Group now expects the commercial robotics market to grow to $23 billion by 2025—34 percent higher than originally predicted.
It’s consumers, though, who account for the biggest spike in demand. BCG’s projections of the consumer market’s size rose by 156 percent. Many prominent firms, including...
North Korea gets relief only when it gives up nuclear weapons, Mattis Says
Speaking Sunday in Singapore at the start of a meeting with the defense ministers of South Korea and Japan, Mattis warned that “we can anticipate at best a bumpy road to the negotiations.”
“As defense ministers we must maintain a strong, collaborative defensive stance so we enable our diplomats to negotiate from a calm position of strength in this critical time,” Mattis said. The ministers were in Singapore for the annual IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, which brings together global defense officials.
He added that all United Nations Security Council resolutions on the regime must stay in place. “North Korea will receive relief only when it demonstrates verifiable and irreversible steps to denuclearization,” Mattis said.
His comments came after Trump conceded that North Korea won’t agree immediately to give up its nuclear arsenal, and seemingly walked back expectations for a quick deal from his planned June 12 Singapore meeting with Kim.
Asked Friday about the vaunted “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions enacted to rein in North Korea, Trump said, “I don’t want to use that term. Because we’re getting along.”
The U.S. has previously insisted that North Korea give up all its weapons before it can shed its pariah status or get any relief from sanctions. North Korea has bristled at the idea, and it’s unclear if the two sides will be able to bridge their differences enough for the meeting to be deemed a success.
Meanwhile, North Korea moved to replace its defense minister ahead of the pivotal negotiations, Japan’s Asahi newspaper reported Sunday, citing people that it didn’t identify. No Kwang Chol, the head of the ruling Workers’ Party’s second economic committee, was chosen to replace Pak Yong Sik, who served as defense chief since May 2015.
Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told the Singapore forum Saturday he was aware of reports Trump no longer planned “maximum pressure” on North Korea.
“I know that President Trump has said he won’t lift sanctions until North Korea agrees to denuclearization,” Onodera said. “I understand that the pressure will remain in place.”
Japan has taken a cautious stance on the North Korea summit, concerned about easing pressure on a regime that only months ago was firing missiles over Japanese territory. Onodera warned against rewarding North Korea for “solely agreeing” to talks, and said Japan sought the removal of ballistic missiles of “all flight ranges” from North Korea.
The summit was resurrected after Trump called it off in a letter to Kim on May 24, complaining of “the tremendous anger and open hostility” in comments from North Korea. But he had also left...
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